For some consumers, normal watches just aren’t cutting it: Global smartwatch shipments grew 12% year over year in 2022, according to Counterpoint Research, as products on both the entry-level and premium price points saw increased demand.

Watch it now: Smartwatches with a wholesale price below $100 saw an increase in shipment share from 29% to 35% between 2021 and 2022, while premium options with a wholesale price above $400 more than doubled over the same time period, from 6% to 13%, a 129% increase year over year.

• Apple led the pack in shipment share, increasing from 32.6% to 34.1% year over year.

Though smartwatch shipments grew overall in 2022, the market ended the year on a relatively weak note: Shipments declined 2% in Q4—the first drop in the market since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Keep reading here.—JM

Last month, VC funding hit a three-year low.

The global monthly funding total fell to $18 billion—the lowest it’s been since February 2020, according to a new Crunchbase report. It was down 63% year over year—from $48.8 billion in February 2022—and the late-stage funding sector saw the biggest decline.

“My biggest takeaway is, in speaking with investors, is that there’s the sense that late-stage funding is in peril, or late-stage funding is really going away,” Gené Teare, senior data editor at Crunchbase, told us, adding, “If you look at every funding stage, it’s down, but late-stage is the most at risk.”

She later added, “If you don’t have to raise in this funding climate, you wouldn’t go out to raise, just because valuations are down.”

Keep reading here.—HF

Stat: Y Combinator, the famed tech accelerator, laid off roughly 20% of its employees and will shift away from late-stage investing.

Quote: “AI is just math. I don’t think that everything in the world should be governed by math. Computers are really good at solving mathematical issues. But they are not very good at solving social issues, yet they are being applied to social problems.”—Meredith Broussard, data scientist and author of More Than a Glitch, to MIT Tech Review

Read: How Samsung uses AI to “fake” (i.e., fill in) zoomed-in photos of the moon.

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• This AI startup is helping organizations automate video editing
• How Google’s 2021 AI ethics debate foreshadowed the future
• How Microsoft is thinking outside the Xbox